Dear Gatlinburg,

Your roads --the curves of women linked together, uncovered we discovered beautiful : hipped and bedrocked-- jurassic slabs of slate. Your cabin's music playing, and fire when we entered, entered where she said yes, I slipped old stones on her finger. Where bears still sleeping, where still illegal for us to marry, you should know you were apart of the story: story where two women become lovers again and again, in the woods, on a hill, in a state where this kind of love is dangerous, not unlike all love. Where we ate at the Old Mill, meat covered in stone ground corn and fried, we tasted you and left the morning before the snow and ice. We slept on the finest pillows,  swallowed from our tongues wine and juice and with dog as witness,  made a promise to each other. We drifted through dark chambers of blue, watched jellyfish through glass umbrella into red, and sharks glided over head. We drove through smoky mountains--their blue aura, their snowy tops and slippery rocks where the cold bit our necks for each photo-op. We were high, we were in clouds, in love and looking out at the curve of the world.

Audio Recording of Where Poetry Begins, I Begin Again

Where Poetry Begins, I Begin Again

Stagnant puddle in a Humidity thick with fly-sweat. Godweb

of sun and heat-- stuck in thismoment forever. Here Poetry begins

with Father Fist and Mother Bruised, cacti needles in skin, carebear

nets and facecake. I knew I was shuddering in some place holy,

some place tattooed into my soul's soul, some place scraping

my mother off pavement with little hands/little water. Heat-stroked

thighs, metal eyes and cat gone hiding beneath the sofa: breathing

ball of endangered fur here Poetry begins in the only cool blue thing: pool,

aurelian surface lapping and slurping into the side-drains. I am rescuing

all the dead bugs, holding them in my palm and blowing onto their wings in belief

I can resurrect. Here Poetry begins so thick I cant separate air from water, sun

from sky, hot from black. My world at his knee cap, my world with a crick

in my, my world whirling around me from where it all began, where there

must have been some frosting amidst swollen lips and eyes my mother wore

the fashion. Some nights dreaming between the two of them I'd awake, listen

to their lungs exhale and fog the room as far as I could see. Some nights I'd lift

myself into the heat-cloud above them and wait for the rain to pour out of me.

But it rarely came and when it did, it came in hard, slanting sheets. Till I became

nothing. It all begins here, here this place needled into the pink behind-my-eyes.

I go back there. I go back. I go back.

Audio Recording of My body, 2015

My body, 2015

Holy sac of bone and blood, beats like a hip-hop song in the attic: I am the lyric carried down through the vents, repeating itself over and over. Not what it used to be, having seen twice the scenes, expanded twice the times in breath and pain, I find it each morning with surprise--my body, holy as stone, softens with time: becomes more and more cave like. Let's make a place of my body: here is home for my lover to write on walls. I'm talking carving, I'm talking home for her to lay her heavy, heavy everything and dissolve: swaddled. Skin-- scarred no matter, color no matter keeps my insides in, holds me in shape of a woman ready to love the world and hate it too, equipped with eyes, tongue let's meet there lover and make her dance. Make her naked, make eyes rattle, bones bend. Let's fold and crinkle her in all the places and get her wet. My body is a place waiting for you to enter, Lover, turn on lights and music when you come, for it grows so quiet without you.

Audio Recording of The Bulimia Years

The bulimia years

Sound of ring clinking sink. Of faucet running

till warm water. Sound of toilette lid opening. Of human

heaving. Splash-of-water sound. More heaving: more splash.

Sound of toilette paper unloosening from squeaky roll.

Nose-being-blown sound. Silence. Sound of hand hitting wall.

Toilette flush. Muffled sound

of lid closing. Water-refilling-tank.Toilette-flushing-again sound.

Silence: throat clearing. Door opening

on rusty hinge. Sound girl makes as she stares into a mirror.

Audio Recording, reading my poem Carousel at Festival Market, 1989

Carousel at Festival Market, 1989

Always I chose the same one-- impaled like the others, by the gleaming

brass pole that fed through its mouth, up its sinuses, up and down it lifted

me in the direction of the roof which sat in the shape of a gold hershey's kiss

over my head. Covered in jewels I found its colors well and equally distributed--

painted like a sun setting over saddle and bridle on a summer day in Kentucky. Who doesnt

find beauty there, in a white horse whose eyes never waver. But glossy, I'd probe my

fingers over them, finger-nail the painted pupil and find also sadness in the shelacked glaze--lifeless as

its body lifted me in enslaved, slow motion grace. I rubbed my hands down

its hard mane in the only externalized evidence of what I imagined to be, but could not yet name,

our mutual brokenness.

Always I chose the same horse, would wait for its back

to become weightless.When the carousel would ring out like a school bell, I'd dash

to her before any other pink'ed girl-child would. With all might I'd fling a leg

high over its back to seat myself on its finger-smoothedness. I was lonely./I was loyal

to an inaminate thing. I was already personifying and attached

to this horse I never named. I didnt know I'd grow up to wonder which Id rather be:

a riding writer or a writing rider, that either way I'd like the sound of the comparison,

the mere assonance would be enough to light me up inside. But back then, it was different,

something sad in my chest was going in slow circles, rising into the air, suspended

as a girl inside a memory would always be.